It is the most exhilarating human rights struggle on record. If we win, we win everything – the butterflies and bats and birds and bees. The world will take on a new, promising shape. The battle lines are drawn. The goal is clear. Science has given women the tools. We need only make use of them. No state, no religion, no patriarchy can stop us, only our own timidity.

Two hundred years ago and more, a brave, worried woman goaded us to trust ourselves.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,1792:

“With respect to religion, she never presumed to judge for herself; but conformed, as a dependent creature should, to the ceremonies of the church which she was brought up in, piously believing that wiser heads than her own have settled that business.”

Now is the time to cast aside received wisdom. We are smarter than we think.